0400 GMT - BEEP...BEEP...BEEP. The alarm goes off and we rush to shower and dress. I take out the last garbage and load the car while Amy wakes up the boys. We lock the lodge up and I walk the keys up to the hotel to drop it off with the night porter. The whole hotel is locked down with big wooden pull down doors at the entrances. I try calling the night porter and after 5 minutes he still doesn't answer. So much for that idea. I look all around to see where I can leave the key, but end up having to drop it on the floor in the entryway.
0505 GMT - Not too bad, we are on the road close to schedule. There is no traffic whatsoever, and the rain is not too bad. All of the petrol stations are empty, so we hope that we will have better luck closer to Glasgow. We are able to navigate to the airport successfully even without the directions that I have misplaced. We find an open petrol station just before the Erskine Bridge. We drop the rental car off in the "early returns" lot and drop the key at the drop box. We then head into the departures section to find Aer Lingus who has our next two flights. The line for the Dublin flight is incredibly long and doesn't even move for the first fifteen minutes due to some sort of problem. Finally they add more agents and the line progresses. I get stressed about the time when the agent tells us that the flight boards in five or ten minutes, so I nix the planned stop at Starbucks for coffee and food. There is a sign claiming a cafe in our gate area, and I think it is better to be closer to our gate. We go through security, and find the food store, an Irish Sandwich shop. We buy some coffee and sandwiches and while we are waiting, another passenger stops me to ask if we left a black bag at security. I count and indeed we left the diaper bag, which would have been near disastrous given that the rest of the diapers are packed and checked. I retrieve it and we head to the gate.
0745 GMT - The sandwiches are horrible. Everyone is rather cranky with me. Eamon is obsessing over a video poker machine that uses Monopoly as is gimmick. I try to explain to him why he is not allowed to play it, but he just thinks I am stopping him from playing with video game. We get early boarded by Aer Lingus, who also lets us carry the "buggy" on board. The flight is quick, only 35 minutes and we are in Dublin.
0900 GMT - We deplane and make our way to the restrooms and pick up another snack. This creates a new blast of arguing from Eamon who only wants things that the stand doesn't have. We compromise on warm ham and cheese which is satisfactory, but still not good. We wind our way through customs (there is not a soul in either the declare or the nothing to declare lines) and then through the ticketing areas and finally through another round of security. Finally we arrive at our gate. A mechanical servicing delay sets our flight back 40 minutes, so we wander around the terminal. We finally are able to board only to learn that they have put Eamon and I in an exit row, which clearly he cannot be in. We wait through the whole boarding process and finally as we begin to taxi the flight attendents move us a few rows up and on the other side of the plane. I have to say that all of AerLingus employees are outstanding...the nicest and most helpful of all the Euroupean crews that we have dealt with among Iberia, British Airways and AerLingus. We fall asleep immediately upon takeoff. I awake and end up supporting Eamon's head until we land and park at the gate.
1245 GMT - We deplane and go to retrieve our luggage. Again, customs is empty of any personnel. We go to Eroupecar and start work on organizing the rental. They decide that the car we have doesn't have a boot large enough for our luggage and bring a different car. They decide that one won't work either, so they upgrade us to a Passat and make it an automatic because they want things to be easy on us. Again, these car rental folk are by far nicer than their counterparts in Scotland. The luggage does fit, and the Passat is easier for Amy to drive, although she does hit the brake rather hard the first time she tries to shift.
1400 GMT - The countryside has been interesting thus far, but somewhat unspectacular. It is pouring rain. Connor has a bit of a screaming fit at one point, and we are trying to find a place to have some food and a brief rest. He falls back asleep before we find someplace suitable, and we decide to keep driving. Eamon then starts to complain that he is hungry, so we start looking for food again. Meanwhile, I am looking through the Frommer's Ireland 2003 book we have brought along. Amy reads a sign about Oysters and I laugh to myself, because I just read a section about the two best Oyster restaurants in this area. Suddenly Amy says, "How about this place?" I have to say yes, because it happens to be Paddy Burke's which is one of the two places I was just reading about. We stop for a bite to eat and a pint. It is nice, and quiet due to the time. We pack up and head out again.
1630 GMT - We are passing through Galway, and it is getting quite late. Even with the stop and the rain, this is taking much longer than we had anticipated based on the RCI information. All this time, Amy has been telling me that the place we are staying at is in Clifden. We don't look like we are going to get there by the 1800 cut off point, we have to be more than 2 hours from Clifden. I take a look at the directions only to find that the cottage is not anywhere near Clifden, but is only 9km from the next town. I tell Amy to stop at the next grocery she finds so that we can get some starter supplies. We find a SuperValu in Oughterard and stock up. I find a bottle of Dunphy's Irish Whiskey while picking up a 4 pack of Guinness, and given this is my Mom's maiden name, I have to buy it.
1730 GMT - We miss the sign to the cottage. The sign, of course, is after the road we have to take, and in the rain we miss it. This is despite the fact that I have just said that the turn should be any minute, and "Oh, look at those lights up on that hill." Of course, the hill was our hill, and the lights were the lights on our cottage. We find a place to U-turn and head back and over "The Quiet Man" Bridge, named for its use in the John Wayne movie of the same name.
We drive up an old, narrow road, with no lighting, in fact, we can't tell if it is even paved, except that we can see tufts of grass in the center. Suddenly and pair of glowing eyes leap in front of the car and race us up the hill. When we find the office for the Connemara Country Cottages, we discover the eyes were that of a small sheep dog pup who has herded us to the offices. We go inside to meet James our host. He welcomes us and gives us a tour of our cottage which is incredibly cute.
There are doors between every room that are to be shut to keep heat in. We have a basket of peat blocks and a bucket of coal for the fire, with a box of starter chunks (smell as though they are soaked in Kerosene).
We have to pay for the electricity (not so bad) and the oil costs (these are outrageous). The oil costs 1 euro per hour which has no mark up according to James. That is simply what he has to pay and with a raised eyebrow he notes that we can thank George W. Bush for that. We laugh and tell him that by the time he hits his state of the union address we will, between Canada, Scotland and Ireland, have spent more time out of the country since his re-election, than we have spent in it. He seems to like this answer. Ireland, unlike Great Britain, is not a supporter of the Iraq invasion and occupation. James keeps calling Eamon, Connor, which Eamon never acknowledges, and we decide to just keep quiet about. He is very sweet, but in the middle of his tour, his cell phone rings, and his wife wants to know if he is coming home for dinner. We obviously came later than he had hoped. He tells us how to work the oil heater and the sauna, and tells us that our keys will open the office if we need to use the phone which accepts coins or cards. There is no phone in our cottage, however there is a satellite television with a few hundred channels. (I check later, and though they have CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, Al Jazeera, Nickelodeon, Boomerang (Eamon cheers for that one), and a million or so football stations (that is soccer to the yanks, of course, but you knew that), there is no ESPN or NBA TV or any way to find out the score of last nights Sonics/Sun game. I am pulling my hair out in wonder. Of course, if you are reading this, than I already know the score, but without a phone or internet access, I am out of luck for the moment. We can't seem to get the peat fire to do more than embers, we must be doing something wrong.
2000 GMT - Eamon chooses to sleep downstairs in the "big" bed since he decides after a try that he doesn't want to climb the ladder to the top bunk. We read some Lemony Snicket (I read the chapter Eamon and Amy read last night on the plane from Glasgow to Dublin.) and Eamon is off to sleep. Meanwhile Amy is nursing Connor to sleep. While I am waiting for her, I scan through the available satellite stations and get plot-locked on the "reveal" episode of Joe Schmoe from Spike TV in America. What am I thinking? I wouldn't watch this show last season when it was on in the states, but here I am trapped on it in the middle of nowhere in Ireland. Perhaps I needed a little brain dead American television to equalize myself. Amy comes down, gives me a disparaging look, and proceeds to become just as plot locked. Finally it is over and I shut it off. We decide to explore Clifden tomorrow and hit the Two Dog Cafe, which I found on the web and also is in Frommers, and offers good food, coffee and INTERNET access. My wait for those Sonics scores will soon be over. We decide to crash for the evening.
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